App to Cut Your Smartphone Addiction

App to Cut Your Smartphone Addiction

Article excerpt

APPLE will launch new controls and reports to help users limit the amount of time they spend staring at their smartphones.

The largest addition to this effort will be an app called Screen Time, which tracks how often you use and unlock the phone, among other things, and sends you a weekly "activity summary" which shows how you used your iPhone or iPad.

"You get deep insight on how much time you're spending, where you're spending it and even how your time breaks down during the day and the night," software engineering senior vice-president Craig Federighi told Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference.

"You get a summary of the time you're spending in apps - how often per hour you're picking up your phone and what's drawing you in and what apps are sending you the most notifications. Equipped with this insight, you can make decisions about how much time you want to spend with your device each day."

Perhaps more importantly for parents, they can also set up their children's phones to receive reports on phone usage and set "allowances" for time spent in individual apps or specify what times of the day they can use them. …